I recently stumbled across an Ajax article on sys-con that I can relate to How Hard is AJAX Coding? . I run into issues like this all the time. This article made me think of putting together a quick list of Ajax tools I have become a custom to using.

Debugging:

Fire Bug is pretty much a must have unless you are building Exclusive IE sites. I really cannot do JavaScript Development without it. I have found IE WebDeveloper to be the closest thing to FireBug out there for IE (although I find myself using Microsoft Script Editor or Visual Studio on occasion for some debugging).FireFox Web Developer is a nice tool bar. I am always doing things like clearing my basic auth header, or clearing my cache and this tool bar is full of goodies.JSView is also a quick tool to look at source of internal files.

Http Testers:

FireFox Poster has proven to be a nice little tool for testing my HTTP Based services. Project Zero has an REST Doc tester now, and it provides some meta-data rendering based on RESTdoc. This is really cool because I can get a sample of my RESTful service.

So for my first post, I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Roland Barcia, but a lot of people call me Roly. I work for IBM Software Services for WebSphere . I am a Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) and Lead Web 2.0 Architect for my group. My focus is to help customers apply Web 2.0 concepts using our SWG, specifically in the WebSphere Brand. I specialize in various platforms, including the new Project Zero Platform, The Web 2.0 Feature Pack for WebSphere , the EJB 3 Feature Pack, and other areas such as WebSphere MQ or DataPower in the context of Web 2.0.

I am going to post on Web 2.0 topics related to middleware, specifically building services around REST, data access in a web 2.0 context, Ajax Patterns, and anything else related to Web 2.0 that may apply. I will talk about technologies like Project Zero and the Dojo Toolkit, and comment generally on what I see people doing in the Web 2.0 space, and try to be as objective as possible.